French

This semi-intensive language course is roughly equivalent to the first quarter or to the first semester of beginning French language instruction on students' home campuses. It introduces basic speaking, listening, reading and writing skills to the complete beginner within a French-immersion context. This course is for absolute beginners only. The textbook for this course is MOTIFS: AN INTRODUCTION TO FRENCH by K. Jansma, 6th Edition, 2014. This course helps students develop the ability to communicate in spoken and written French. By the end of the course, students have been presented with the basic structures of French grammar and obtain a basic working vocabulary organized according to certain themes. Students are presented with information on French and Francophone culture on the following topics: greetings, identifying and describing people and things, leisure activities and sports, vacation time, family structures, schooling, the workplace, the news, eating and drinking, café life, and the geography, music, and cuisine of the francophone world. Students engage in short conversations using simple sentences and basic vocabularies, with limited use of perfect and recent past tenses and occasionally use near future tense. Covered in this course are: present, perfect, recent past, and near future tenses, along with high-frequency regular and irregular verbs, high-frequency reflexive verbs, the polite conditional mood, subject and object pronouns, articles, prepositions, possessive adjectives, interrogative expressions, and time and weather expressions. Basic oral competency skills are covered. Students are required to read, understand, and discuss short, highly contextualized and predictable texts, containing cognates and borrowed words, on very familiar topics. They also are required to write with some accuracy on well-practiced, familiar topics using limited, formulaic language in simple French. Students reflect upon basic cultural differences as reflected in a variety of French and Francophone contexts. This course involves class participation in tasks such as whole class discussion, small group and pair work, role play, games, and individual and group presentations. Cultural immersion activities are included and students may choose to pursue a personal project, such as an off-site dance or art course or similar activity, or to take part in instructor-led site visits. The course uses the city of Paris as a living laboratory to provide students with real life scenarios to help develop their speaking and listening skills.

This is a beginner level French language course for students with no prior French language background. It focuses on understanding and using simple sentences concerning daily life, saluting, spelling, pronunciation, numbers and telling time, introducing oneself or someone else, directions, press headlines and simple articles, and using basic formulas of politeness. It builds skills to ask and answer simple questions, express preferences, and make plans in settings such as stores, restaurants, banks, doctors' offices, the post office, and while traveling. The course covers nouns and noun groups, nouns and determiners, and descriptive, possessive, and demonstrative adjectives. It also introduces first group verbs, irregular and auxiliary verbs, semi-auxiliary verbs, as well as verb tenses such as indicative present, near future, recent past, and past perfect. 

This course is designed for students who have already reached the A1 level. It continues developing their proficiency and practice in French. Various oral and written skills are practiced through a range of activities, so that students can gradually feel more comfortable with topics they are familiar with. The course also focuses on strengthening grammatical and vocabulary knowledge by introducing new elements, which enable students to respond to various situations in everyday life.

This course provides rehearsal of a wide range of choral pieces. Using the basic principles of song (solfege), students sing a Capella and to piano accompaniment. The repertoire includes works by classical composers as well as modern composers. Additional topics include learning polyphony, musical autonomy from tutti to quartet, and discovery of the choral repertoire.

This course traces the development of films in the “young cinema” of the 1960s in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard are studied as well as Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Milos Forman, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Roman Polanski. The course uses various examples to examine how movies can undermine conventions and break with classical cinema. The course considers the notion of modernity with relation to the following: what does modernity count for; what does it mean; can it be categorized as an aesthetic category; is it representative a historical period; and why did it have its renewal in the 1960s.

This intensive language course focuses on oral and written French, review of grammar, language, and written expression. Oral French focuses on difficult cases of spelling, vocabulary of selected fields, and sentence structure. Written work includes advanced grammar, syntax, and spelling, with a focus on academic writing for French universities. Texts on contemporary French society are used as a base for discussion topics.